Cockatoo miraculously survives trapped in a car grille

A cockatoo that was sucked into the grille of a car travelling at 100 kilometres an hour has miraculously survived.

The bird was hit by the car, but the driver had no idea she had done so when she was travelling for nearly 30 minutes in South Australia.

"I believe he would have hit the grille and his body just shot through the plastic," Wendy Warren from Casper's Bird Rescue told Today Tonight.

"He was quite distressed. Obviously, you would be if you'd been hit by a car that hard. So he was flapping about and squawking and making a big fuss," Ms Warren said.

His whole body was stuck in the grille with his two wings poking out.

Ms Warren managed to rescue him using a crowbar and saw, to break through the grille.

"I thought he would at least have a few fractures, his wing was quite twisted when we pulled him out. But the worst he has is one little scratch under one wing and one missing flight feather," she says.

The cockatoo, named Pretzel, is incredibly lucky to have survived. If he was a little bit higher he would have hit the bonnet and a little bit lower he would have gone under the wheel, Ms Warren says.

Ms Warren named him Pretzel as he resembled the shape of the bread when rescuers found him.